Losing My Marbles.

One would think that the prospect of a four day weekend would incite an aura of rest and relaxation in the ole noggin.
However, I spent a very great deal of time these last four days Stressed. (Please notice the capital S.)
Methinks I really am losing my marbles. Like, really. Just call me Tootles. I know that I wrote a blog about being forgetful. But this is beyond forgetful. We’s talking huge chunks of my temporal lobe breaking off from the rest of my brain. No joke.
It all started Friday night. I was having a little Christmas Island party at my apartment (best holiday song ever!) and of course I was running late. In my mad dash to get dressed, makeup-ed, food set up, drinks set up - I overlooked my pearl earrings sitting on the bathroom sink counter.

Buzzers were ringing, guests arriving, champagne buzz was setting in, and I’d finally finished my hair. I set my straightener down to cool & exited the b-room in one fell swoop - hearing as I did so a little clink, clank, clunk.

Pearl earring down! The drain, that is.

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat. Whaaaaaaaaaaaat??? Did that really just happen?

Yes, Katie. Yes it did.

From there on out, my weekend - my mind - spiraled out of control. I was on a freight train speeding to a town called Forgetful and there was no turning back.

I barricaded my sink - luckily the drunken Islanders abided by the rules! My pearl was safe and sound in the dodgy, dirty, undoubtedly hair-ridden U hook of those ancient pipes.

At least I hoped it was!


I called Rocky the Super the next day - lucky for me he was around - and after scolding me for not taking all my junk out from the cabinet underneath, he set to it.

Sinks are disgusting. Well, let me rephrase. The shit that goes down a sink’s drain is disgusting. Horrendous. Or, rather, hair-rendous. IIIIICK. Rocky yelled at me some more, but it’s not like I do it on purpose! Hair falls out. Especially when you blow dry it. And it’s not like I can keep the daily lossage allotment from escaping down the sink!
Nevertheless, amidst the hair and the brown water spilling all over my cabinets and onto my super clean (no longer!) bathroom floor, THERE WAS MY PEARL!!!!! Omgees, Lady Luck indeedy!

That is, until I realized I’d lost the other pearl. The non-down-the-drain earring. The one that was left on the counter.

I remember picking it up when Rocky came in. But everything that transpired henceforth went poof!, right from my mind.

I proceeded to spend the next three hours scouring and searching and tearing apart and digging. All to no avail. Was this real life? I couldn’t believe it. To rescue one pearl earring from the impossibly vile depths of a bathroom sink pipe (which ended up cracking so I haven’t been able to use it all weekend), only to LOSE its comrade in my apartment. What.
I had no.idea.whatsoever. where the hell it had gone. So I called my mom - aka Santa - to see if it was too late to ask for a new pair for Christmas.
“Yes, Mom, I looked there. Yep. Yeah. Of course I looked there. Yup. Mmm hmm. YES, I did looked through the trash already. Twice!”

Alas, she knows me better than I know myself and suggested I look through the trash once more - wearing gloves. (My ladylike hands do not like to touch garbage - even if it is all mine.)

There was coffee grinds and barbeque chicken/sweet and sour meatball sauce and dirty, hair ridden paper towels and it was just...nasty. But latex gloved and therefore safe, I set out feeling my way through the trash.

Lo and behold!, I found the earring. What? WHAT! One pearl retrieved from a filthy, hairy abyss, only to find its mate amidst soggy coffee and stinky, sticky BBQ sauce.

So to recap, I’ve survived a weekend sans bathroom sink. I’ve ended up with a stubbed, swollen toe (a board that was under the sink fell on my foot), a messy, messy bathroom floor (I have so many products), and a spittle filled kitchen sink.
Ever try brushing your teeth and washing your face in your kitchen sink? Amongst dirty plates and dish brushes? So unbearably uncivilized. (It’s kind of nuts how barbaric it is. You just feel like such a dirty little slime ball, YUCK!)
But my weekend of lost-marbles hell didn’t end with the earring dramarama. Oh no. The memory gods had it out for me. As if my feeble, forgetful mind hadn’t failed me quite enough already, it had to go and disremember where I put my brand spanking new iPod earbuds.

I searched and researched every square inch - all 2,016 of them - for the second day in a row. Drawers upon drawers, hidden surfaces upon hidden subsurfaces, all without a stitch of the same luck that befell me during Saturday’s (mis)adventures.
My mind is going, going, oh wait - no - actually it’s gone. No dankes.
(An addendum: Shortly after I’d finished writing this blog last night, my lovely friend Dana, a sharpshooting pool hustler, sent me a message - she had the headphones all along! Silly lass dropped her bag at my apartment Friday night and must have scooped them up by accident! So really my marbles are only half gone.)